Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Story of Your Life’ Has a New Title and a Release Date

To say we’re excited for a new Denis Villeneuve film is an understatement. After the fantastic triple-threat of Prisoners, Enemy and Sicario, the director is moving on to the realm of sci-fi with Story of Your Life and Blade Runner 2. Before the latter arrives next year, we have the former to look forward to, with a cast that includes Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner — and it looks like it just got a title change and an official release date.

Paramount held a test screening of Villeneuve’s latest last week, where it was presented under the title Arrival, and The Wrap now confirms that this is indeed the title under which the film will be released on November 11. It’s not as intriguing a title as Story of Your Life, and it’s definitely overt in its extraterrestrial implications, but Arrival is more in keeping with Villeneuve’s last three films, which all had single-word titles.

Scripted by Eric Heisserer (who also penned the remake of The Thing) and based on a short story by Ted Chiang, Arrival stars Amy Adams as a linguistics expert who is tapped by the military to help them discern the motives of a group of aliens that recently landed on Earth. Once she begins interacting with the aliens, Adams experiences strange flashbacks that offer clues to their history and why they’re really here.

Arrival co-stars Forest Whitaker and incomparable character actor Michael Stuhlbarg, and despite its genre leanings, the awards season release date — along with a strong roster of talent — bodes well for Villeneuve’s latest. Not only does it appear that Paramount is very confident in the project, but that it may actually have a chance of impressing the Academy come Oscar time. That’s a particularly exciting prospect, considering that genre films are typically ignored by Academy voters. But if anyone can buck that trend, it’s Villeneuve.